Cleanup
by Roadstergal
Summary: An interlude between Rimmerworld and Out Of Time. Losing the vapor trail, and an adversary who never, ever fights dirty. Mild slash at the end of part II.
1. Chapter 1

Quiet. Such a rare thing, since they had become stuck on Starbug, and Lister relished it. It wasn't an absolute quiet - the engines hummed, sending vibrations through the rickety lander, which creaked and moaned in response. But those were bearable noises, gentle noises. They weren't explosions or crashes, screaming fights, or Rimmer's nasal voice sending breathtakingly offensive words floating in his direction.

"Changeover, Listy!"

All too short a bit of silence it had been, too. Lister nodded, but felt a reluctance to move from his comfortable spot, leaning back slightly in the pilot's chair, his boots resting on unimportant areas of console. He took a sip of tea, and as he heard Rimmer settle into the chair behind him, felt like just staying there for a while. Peaceful starlight ahead, tea and comics, Rimmer in the same room - but without sniping, just quietly sharing space.

"Perhaps you didn't _hear_ me, miladdio. Does doing _that_ too often take away hearing as well as eyesight?"

"Ask Rachel," Lister snapped back, then winced. _Damn_ it. They couldn't share a room for ten seconds anymore without bickering. Testy smeghead.

Lister heard the chair behind him creak as Rimmer leaned back. He knew, even before he turned, that Rimmer would have his hands laced over his stomach and would be staring airily at Lister, one eyebrow quirked. "Now, now, Listy, no need to get snippy. Just because she has more taste and class than any of _your_ girlfriends..."

Lister interrupted him by noisily rising from the pilot's seat. "We're out of caramel sauce, so she'll just taste like polyethylene from now on." His placid mood was shot to hell. Rimmer had a way of doing that. The hologram turned to his console as Lister headed to the doorway. Lister turned his head as he was walking though the hatch, and saw the fringe where Rimmer's hair was cropped at his neck; since Rimmer was hard-light now, Lister could annoy him in turn. He flicked that patch of bare neck sharply with his forefinger before entering the midsection.

Rimmer leapt to his feet with an irate yelp, and leaned into the midsection, his mouth opening to spit something back. Lister turned, speaking before Rimmer could. "Oi, you leavin' the cockpit unmanned? That's pretty irresponsible, innit?"

Rimmer twisted his mouth, then pulled back into the cockpit, his voice the only part of him that did not say, "Smegging bastard."

Lister picked his new-to-him guitar up. Thank the stars he had found it on a derelict; it was just about all he had that was truly good, these days. It had been so hard, the two months he had not been able to hear the sweet strains of his songs! When he had found this one, he had run straight back to his room with it, shedding his space-suit to lie on the floor, and written a love ballad right then and there. The others had been moved, when he performed it in the midsection; Rimmer had joyfully proclaimed, "Oh, shit, he found another one."

Kryten waddled in with a tray of food - some indefinable, pale-yellow mush - as Lister gently tuned the guitar. "Lister, don't make me come out and smash that one, too!" Rimmer bellowed from the cockpit. Lister sighed and strummed out one melodic A chord. Kryten suddenly stopped in his tracks.

"Krytes?" Lister asked. He frowned; Kryten stood there, motionless. Lister stood, put the guitar back in the corner, and snapped his fingers in front of Kryten's face. "Kryten!"

The mechanoid seemed to come back to himself with a jerk. He bobbled the tray, managing to finally catch it. "Oh, my apologies, Mister Lister! I think your chord started a bit of resonance that shorted out my cognitive functions." Kryten shook himself, then put the tray down on the table. "Supper, sir; curried Jovian tunabeest with extra turmeric."

Lister grinned and sat down at the table. Their most recent raid had not yielded much, aside from that oh-so-needed guitar, but it _had_ gotten them some halfway decent food, enough for Kryten to space out the nettle casseroles with something a little more edible. He grabbed a forkful and chewed; nicely fiery. "Great food, Kryten!" he said with a grin. Then he frowned. Kryten was shifting uneasily from foot to foot. "What's up?"

"Oh, nothing at all!" Kryten said, far too heartily, with an unnaturally broad smile. "Just..."

"What?" Lister asked, as Kryten trailed off and started to shift again, working his square fingers against each other.

"Well... we can't find Red Dwarf's vapor trail." Kryten whipped out a cloth and started to polish the table, giving the matter far more attention than it deserved.

Lister sighed and pushed his tray away. _Damn_ Rimmer and his cowardice. Damn him, too, for running after the smeghead and rescuing him. Kryten and Cat hadn't been in favor of it. Couldn't he once, just once, leave the smegger to his richly deserved fate? "It got the jump on us while we were picking up Rimmer?"

Kryten hissed out an odd mechano-sigh. "Not _exactly_."

Lister stood, annoyance scraping sharp nails down his spine. "_What_ exactly, Kryten? Spit it out!"

"Well, we can't say for sure what effect passing through the time-hole twice might have had. We might have equalized out the time distortions, and Red Dwarf is just barely out of range. Or one might have dominated, and we're now 600 years early or late."

Lister shook his head. "It's as bad as waiting for a London bus on Saturday night. So we have no idea where and when Red Dwarf is?"

Kryten nodded, his face looking like a set of Legos was about to cry. "Yes, Mister Lister!" he squeaked.

Lister sighed and sat down. He pulled the tray back towards himself. Well, it was done. No sense in letting it ruin his supper.

xxxxxx

The meeting in the midsection after he had finished eating was every bit as tense and unpleasant as he predicted. Cat seethed at the loss of his suits, and made references to Rimmer's dubious parentage for his role in depriving Cat of them. He tossed a few shots at Lister, too, for losing the Dwarf in the first place, before stalking out of the midsection with a yowl. Rimmer sneered at his departing back, and said something about the necessity of a strong rearguard defense plan that Lister did not let him finish before telling him to shut his overly large mouth or he'd rip the H off and stick it down Rimmer's throat sideways.

A moment of silence followed that exchange. Lister took a few deep breaths and got his temper reined back in - slightly. Rimmer glared at everything in the midsection, his arms crossed. Kryten fiddled pointlessly with the psi-scan.

"Ah, sirs," Kryten said, finally. "We have been passing by a number of planets without scanning them thoroughly. One of them may now be a more reasonable destination for us, however. We're coming up on a solar system with what looks like an S3 planet - the third one out."

"Ah," Rimmer snapped, "is this like the S3 planet the scanners picked up that turned out to be that lager can Lister had started orbiting the lander after last week's binge?"

"Kryten said he fixed that scanner. It's at least worth a look. If we can find a halfway decent planet to settle on - well, we might just have to call it good. We don't know where or when Red Dwarf is." Lister thought of Holly, alone - or a prisoner, or shut down - and felt like a steaming pile of utter shit. But any direction they went might very well be utterly the wrong one. What good, he wondered for the umpteenth time, would a three-million-years-out-of-date lander that was stuck together with chewing gum be against whatever had hijacked Red Dwarf? Well, he would have given it a shot - but they couldn't _find_ the damn thing.

"Suppose it's swarming with Psirens?" Rimmer groused.

"Suppose it's swarming with six-breasted green alien women? Look on the bright side, Rimmer!"

"At this point, Psirens _would_ be a bright side." Rimmer stood. "_Fine_. Let's take a look."

xxxxxx

"Rimmer... the scanners said there were only small fish and algae here." Lister did not like the way Rimmer was waving that bazookoid around, especially considering how closely he was hovering at Lister's back.

"I trust the 'Bug's scanners as much as a plumbing estimate," Rimmer muttered, trying to glance in all directions at once.

Lister sighed, and walked the rest of the way down the gangplank. The ground was soft and squishy, and his footprints filled with water behind him. The planet had showed as a waterworld from above, and it was one, indeed. The island they had landed on was barely large enough to hold the 'Bug. Water stretched out to the horizon in every direction, broken by small hillocks like the one they were on, and a few smaller islands that shot up from the water like lead pencils, the eraser-tip a collection of dripping orange algae. Wet sun filtered through a thick cloud cover.

"This is depressin'," Cat snorted. "This pussy don't like water, and it sure don't like the grey and orange color scheme, either."

Lister nodded. "This is freakin' depressing." He squished his way around the island. It did not take long. "I'd go spare. Let's give it a pass."

"Now, wait just a minute, miladdio!" Rimmer interjected. "Habitable and safe. Do you really think you'll do better?"

Lister spread his arms. "Habitable? Are you smeggin' kiddin' me? What, live in mud huts that sink an inch every day and eat orange algae for the rest of me life? No way, Rimmer. We're movin' on."

Rimmer stood at the base of the gangplank and did not move. "Do you know how rare S3 planets are? Rare as redheaded Chinese men named Edward. It takes a certain distance from the sun and a really big satellite to siphon off the atmosphere. We might never find one again."

"We'll certainly never find another one as depressin' as this. At least, I hope not. I'd rather live on the 'Bug. We're goin'."

He and Cat practically bodily moved Rimmer a few steps up the gangplank before the hologram gave up, with bad grace, and stalked back into the lander. He tossed the bazookoid aside with unnecessary noise. The three of them joined Kryten in the cockpit.

"No go, Krytes!" Lister announced. "Too dismal."

"It was perfectly good," Rimmer muttered. "Too smegging stupid."

Kryten spoke over the tail end of that sentence more loudly. "Please strap in, gentlemen. I have identified another craft approaching this planet, and it might be a good idea to be aloft and ready when we encounter them."

"Another ship?" Lister asked as Cat started to pull them out of the planet's atmosphere. "What kind?"

Rimmer was busy at his station. "It looks like us!"

"Not quite," Kryten replied, tapping at his own console. "It is a Starbug Mark IV; they made a number of improvements to the landers after Red Dwarf left the solar system. _What Craft_ called the Mark IV "The first truly reliable and, dare I say it, useful ship in the Starbug lineup."

"So they can outrun us and outgun us," Lister said, shifting uncomfortably.

"In all likelihood, yes. However, there is no reason to believe their intentions are unfriendly. Ah, they are attempting to communicate." Kryten punched a few buttons, and the screen above his head flickered to life.

All crew members shifted in their seats to catch a view of whoever was on the other ship. Lister hoped they were all as startled as he was to see Kryten's head appear on the screen.

"Greetings, Simulants and hologram!" it said, in a voice with a smooth, precise accent. Ah, not exactly Kryten; this mechanoid sounded like Kryten had before Lister had rebuilt the damaged mechanoid. He _had_ worried about that strange mishmash accent that Kryten had ended up with, but as he had still appeared to function correctly... Lister pushed the thought to the back of his mind as this not-Kryten continued. "It is most delightful to contact you! However, I must apologize for our forthcoming impoliteness. We are the feared Mop Pirates of Baxarquon Six. We will board you and appropriate any useful belongings you have on hand, as well as your fuel. You are quite outclassed, so please do not force us to cause harm to your vessel. It would take ever so long to clean up."


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Ah, yes, the hummus moment. Classic Dwarf.**

"Erm... we're not Simulants," Lister replied to the polite, cheerful, angular head on the comm-screen. "I'm human, and he's a Cat."

It chuckled genially. "Ah, don't be silly. We all know that the human race is now extinct, along with all of their domestic pets. The cockroaches made sure that no humans remained. Prepare to be boarded."

"No, no, really! I'm human, see?" Lister pulled his jacket and long johns apart to show his chest.

"Stunning plan, Lister - make them too ill to fight," Rimmer muttered.

Lister grabbed the seat and just barely missed being pitched headlong onto the floor as Starbug rocked from side to side. Rimmer and Cat batted at sparks that spat out of the consoles. "We will not warn you again," the mechanoid said. "We will maneuver into docking range. If you prepare any resistance, we will destroy you. Meet us at the door with no weapons, or we will kill you once we dock. All four of you, and the fifth life-form that is currently in the sleeping quarters." The mechanoid nodded, then added, sweetly, "Have a good day!" The image flickered out.

Lister frowned at Kryten. "Fifth life-form?"

"I think he means your sock basket, bud," Cat interjected, batting out the last of the small electrical fires and shaking his cuffs back into place. Kryten nodded in agreement.

Lister sighed. "All righ', we have a pack of killer mechanoids ready to board us and take everything we have - which isn't much, but we need our fuel! Any ideas?" Lister was expecting Rimmer to suggest surrender immediately, but the hologram folded his arms and bit his lip.

"Blast 'em!" Cat cried. "Both barrels, as soon as they walk in. Boom-boom-boom!"

Kryten leaned into the aisle. "A fine suggestion, sir, except that we will only be able to take down, realistically, one or two, before the rest pull back and blast us out of the sky. If I may, sir - I am a mechanoid. Perhaps they will listen to me, if I explain that our intentions are benign, and we have little of value."

Rimmer snorted. "And perhaps they won't, and we'll be completely and utterly smegged. As I see it, the only way out of this is to convince them that Lister is a human, since mechanoids are incapable of harming a human. The only problem with that is that someone is going to have to convince _me_ that he is, first."

Lister slumped back in his chair with a sigh. Whistling in the dark it might be, but it was fecking annoying. Couldn't the guy hold his sarcastic tongue for ten smegging minutes? "Look, forget all of that. I have an idea. Kryten, do you remember when I shorted out your circuits this morning with my A chord?"

"Is that what that was? I thought it was the death cry of an anally raped hyena."

"Shut it, Rimmer. Krytes?"

"Yes, I think I see where you are going, Mister Lister. Of course, I _have_ been repaired by you many times in the past, so it's possible that my response is not an accurate predictor of how the other mechanoids will react. But unless we can think of a better plan in five minutes..."

"Have Lister _serenade_ the pirates to death?" Rimmer said, his voice shooting into high-pitched disbelief. "Yes, I have a better idea! When they come in, let's shoot some foul language at them! Take Kryten's dusters and tickle them until they surrender!"

"I'll take that as a no," Lister said, standing. He headed for the midsection. "Kryten, open up the airlock when they dock." He picked up his guitar and sat on the midsection table. _Come on, baby,_ he thought, stroking it. _Get us out of this_.

Cat walked over, cocking the bazookoid he had picked up. "You know I'd rather wear jelly sandals then agree with theater marquee head," he muttered into Lister's ear, "but this is the nuttiest plan I've heard all week."

"It'll work, I promise," Lister hissed back. Well, if it did, he'd be right, and if it didn't, Cat would have no opportunity to say 'I told you so.'

Rimmer sat on the table on the other side and, surprisingly, sneered. Rather, it was not surprising that he sneered, but that he sat on the table. A clang reverberated through the midsection. "Eh, shouldn't you be under that?" Lister asked. "They're comin'."

"The colanders are all in the wash," Rimmer muttered. He did shift backwards, putting Lister ahead of himself in the line of fire. Ah, all is still right with the world, Lister thought.

The airlock hissed open. A mechanoid stepped through. It had Kryten's angular shape, but its plastisteel body was hung with bright red scarves. A hole had been punched through a shoulder plate, and a yellowish titanium hoop hung through it. A stuffed parrot sat on its shoulder. Another mechanoid followed, that one draped in blue.

"Ar," said the first one, in a smooth, cultured accent. "Prepare to be boarded, sirs. Good evening!" It looked around the midsection. "Where is the mechanoid? And the fifth life-form?"

_Here we go, baby_, Lister thought. He carefully arranged his fingers, and strummed the guitar with a firm hand. The note rang through the midsection. Cat and Rimmer winced, and the mechanoids turned to Lister, wearing equally angular expressions of puzzlement. "Excuse me, sir, are you all right?" asked the second one, in a voice nearly identical to the first.

Smeg! Lister thought. His heart sank as he drummed his fingers helplessly on the guitar, trying to think of something, _anything_ else.

"That wasn't A," Rimmer muttered to the back of Lister's neck.

Oh, of course! Lister hurriedly changed his finger positions and gave another firm strum. Cat spat out a pitiful mew of discomfort, and the mechanoids stopped in their tracks.

"That wasn't A, either," Rimmer said, peeking around Lister, "but it _did_ seem to work."

Kryten hurried out of the cockpit and trotted over to the mechanoids. He pushed some kind of release on the ears of the frozen pirates, swung the tops of their heads open, and pulled something out. "Good work, Mister Lister! Perhaps we should secure their ship?"

Cat and Rimmer slouched into chairs with a sigh as Lister and Kryten boarded the pirate ship. "We are never going to get that thing away from him again," Cat groused, not very quietly at all.

Half an hour later, the ship was secure. Kryten and Lister had found and disabled two more pirates, which seemed to be the ship's entire complement. Rimmer and Cat had been in favor of taking over the pirate ship and leaving the disabled mechanoids on the lesser Starbug to rot. Kryten and Lister, however, thought it better to rig up a delayed-revival for the mechanoids and leave them back on their looted ship, with only enough fuel to reach the watery planet.

"It's the considerate thing, yeh? Karma, and tha'," Lister said.

"It's the ludicrous thing, yeah. Stupidity, and that," Rimmer groused. But when he tried to call it a violation of Space Corps directive 8943/c, and Kryten asked where they would get a nostril hair trimmer in deep space, he stomped off in a huff and told them to do whatever the smeg they wanted - just as long as they left him out of it.

The ship had little enough of use. Cat was delighted to have some colorful fabric to spice up his wardrobe a bit. The mechanoids had no food or drink, but enough cleaning supplies to give Kryten a thrill. He insisted on offloading all of it. "Just what I need to spruce this place up a bit!" Lister found a small box of electronics in the living quarters. With that on board, the fuel siphoned, and the delayed revival (against vocal protests from Cat and Rimmer) set up, they left the pirate ship and headed towards the nearest cluster of solar systems.

It was only natural to celebrate. They had a little cheese, which Lister wished Rimmer would not speculate had come from between toes, as it looked just like it had. They also had wine, which surprised everyone but Kryten. "Oh, yes, I've just been brewing this from urine recyc!" he said, proudly. "It's good, truly it is. A good year, a good bite."

Lister sampled it while digging through the box of electronics. It was tart. Hell, it was bitter, and had the flavor of rotting fruit. But it was alcoholic, and that was just what Lister wanted. Cat sniffed at it, sampled it dubiously, and ran off somewhere to be sick. Rimmer pushed his glass away, untouched, and slouched back in his chair, picking at the cheese with disinterest. Kryten sniffed and headed back into the cockpit, looking vaguely offended.

Lister grinned and shook his head, then swallowed down half a glass of the wine as quickly as he could. It actually got better the more of it he had, he decided. He started to pick through the box of electronics. He tossed aside psi-scans and odd knobby weapon-like things, which Rimmer looked at with interest as soon as they hit the table. At the bottom of the box, Lister found a flat, covered tray; when he opened it, he saw that it contained an array of very small circuit boards. He pulled the tray close as he sucked down the last of his glass of wine. The boards were set in small labeled niches, which said in painstakingly neat, machine-like writing, things like "Nip," "Strong drink," "Shy of a bender," "Thrashed."

"Oi!" Lister yelled into the cockpit. "What are these, Krytes?" He waved the tray of boards.

Kryten poked his blocky head into the midsection. "Those are hologrammatic scrambler cards, Mister Lister." He still sounded rather petulant. Maybe he needed a drink. Lister giggled. "They are to simulate an inebriated state without the drawbacks of alcohol."

Before he could pull his head back out, Rimmer waved one of the knobby things. "And what, pray tell, is this?"

"It's a Mimian sexual aid." Kryten nodded, then withdrew. Rimmer dropped the object like it had suddenly caught afire.

Lister giggled again and refilled his glass. "Hey, good news for you, eh? Celebration in a chip!" He pulled out the "Strong drink" chip, waving it at Rimmer.

Rimmer crossed his arms. "No smegging way. Who knows what that might do to me?"

It took a great deal of persistence, but that was one thing Lister had no shortage of, especially when he was well on his way to Nicely Drunk. He managed to get Rimmer to shift so soft-light to try out the "Nip" chip. What Lister found particularly brilliant was that this, in turn, made it easier to convince Rimmer to try out the Strong Drink, which made Lister have to tell him to take it easy and just try the "Shy of a bender" instead of going straight to "Thrashed."

It was almost companionable - Lister drinking the recyc, which almost tasted good at that point, and Rimmer sitting unsteadily in his chair, back to hard-light, feeling the effects of the "Shy of a bender" chip. They rehashed old stories, somehow enjoying each others' pranks more than they had at the time they had been subjected to them. Rimmer segued to telling horribly dull stories of his childhood, ones that he obviously felt were terribly tragic. Lister stopped listening and just sat back and listened to the nasal drone, watching the man's facial muscles nervously fidget from one expression to another. He made up a conversation in his head to match the movements, and snickered when the expressions matched his imaginary conversation particularly well. The man was quite fun, sometimes, when he didn't mean to be. He was... he was asking something.

"You don't... shink... that's normal, is it? Listy?" Rimmer reached forward and grabbed Lister's arm, with nervous earnestness.

"I... what?"

"You know - for a bloke to... like another bloke, like that. That's what my brothers... said."

Lister laughed and patted the hand on his arm. Rimmer wasn't normally a touch-person, and it pleased Lister to see the man unwind somewhat. "Nah, that's jusht a loada crap that insecure blokes foist off, ya know. It's all good." He finished off... what number of glass was it? It didn't matter. It was a long time since he had moved passed Nicely Drunk and gotten to the state of inebriation that had landed him on Red Dwarf in the first place. Some part of his brain still firmly believed that he would, someday, get drunk enough to end up back on Earth again, three million years and change gone like a bad dream.

Part of him was startled when Rimmer leaned forward and pressed a nervous kiss to his lips, but part of him found it to be just a natural resolution of all the goddam tension they had experienced since they had become stuck on the lander. The latter part giggled as Rimmer pulled back, and poured himself another glass. "Yeh taste like toothpaste," he tittered.

"I haven't been dh... rinking," Rimmer muttered, swaying back.

"Ah," Kryten said, hurriedly, as he stepped out of the cockpit. "It looks like you've had a bit much, Mister Lister. I should help you back to your room." Rimmer stared at the mechanoid as if he had materialized out of thin air.

"Naaaaah!" Lister said, rising to his feet and grabbing the nearest full bottle of wine. "Rimmeh will help me on his way back, won't you, Rimsy? Krytes, keep an eye on the cockpit, wouldja?"

Rimmer swayed to his feet, a startled look on his face. Lister grabbed his arm and took a swig from the bottle, balancing against the hologram as they staggered out of the midsection - Kryten looking on with a worried look on his face.

xxxxxx

Lister woke in his bed with one of the worst hangovers of his life - and he had experienced some doozies. The gentle thrum of Starbug's engines sounded a monotone tom-tom of pain in his head. He groaned and rolled over on his back, hoping that getting his left ear off of the bed would ease the reverberation. He noted a few things, at that point. He noted that his jacket and long johns were pulled open and half-off of his shoulders, leaving his chest bare to the navel. The crotch of his long johns was uncomfortably warm and sticky, as if he had ejaculated with them still on. His left boot was on his foot, while his right one was nowhere in sight. Finally, he could not remember a bit of what had happened after he left the midsection.

Lister groaned in earnest. Smeg, smeg, smeg! Well, at least he hadn't wound up somewhere worse than Starbug. His pounding, aching head would not allow for any more analysis than that, though. Lister struggled out of bed with another heartfelt groan. Maybe Kryten would have something that would help his horrid headache. He staggered to his feet, glancing at the small mirror over the sink on his way out of the door. It was a bad idea. He looked exactly as smeggy he felt. His hair was sticking out in strange tufts, his mouth was drooping, and huge dark circles hung underneath his eyes. He had a strange yellow mustache, too, one that did not go away when he rubbed his lip with his sleeve. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered more than the smegging blasted headache that he had to smegging get rid of.

When he reached the midsection and loudly demanded relief, Kryten gave him two little red pills and a worried look. The pills took his headache down to a reasonable level, once he figured out the proper orifice for them. He then turned to the task of trying to get the mustache off.

Lister had settled down at the midsection table with a bottle of turpentine when Rimmer walked in. The last man alive dabbed at his lip with a thinner-soaked rag and winced, then raised his eyebrows at Rimmer. The hologram did not meet his eyes; he dropped a boot on the floor, walked over to the box of electronics, put it in the waste disposal unit with unnecessary noise, and ejected it into space. Rimmer then turned and walked back out towards the personal quarters, his back as stiff as the erection Lister had sprung when the hologram had walked into the room.

Lister sighed and turned back to the bottle of turps. At least it had gotten the mustache off.


	3. Beast, pt 1

Lister squinted out of the viewscreen at the ragged cluster of stars ahead. The view normally looked like a random speckling of stars, but the formation ahead stood out like a spoonful of sour cream splattered on a burnt-to-black mutton curry. He tried to trace lines between the stars, like an oversized join-the-dots puzzle. He managed to make it spell a very filthy word, which, by a good coincidence, fit his mood perfectly.

"Veeery interesting," said one of the reasons he was in a mood that demanded a rude word. Lister glanced over his shoulder to where Rimmer squinted at the view, his nose wrinkled in a pose that he seemed to find studious. Nobody else did.

"Yeah, Cat said we got in visual range during his shift," Lister replied. "It's just been gettin' bigger. I'm thinking of calling up Kryten; I think it's pretty, but he can tell us if it's a good idea to go in or not."

Rimmer's face flowed seamlessly from studiousness to irritation. "We do not need _Kryten's_ help to find out if we can go into a smegging... star... cluster... thing."

"Whot, do you still have those astronavigation notes on yer left thigh?" Lister asked, raising his eyebrows. Past Rimmer's face, which was moving from irritation to haughtiness, he caught a glimpse of Kryten bustling about in the midsection's kitchen. "Krytes!" he yelled. "Have you seen this?"

Kryten trotted into the cockpit with a high-kneed gait. "Ah, the globular cluster! Yes, Mister Cat pointed that out to me while he was on duty. I instructed him to head for it. There is a better chance of finding a habitable planet in there than in deep space, I believe."

Rimmer leaned back in his chair and faced Kryten, lacing his fingers over his stomach. "Forgive a certain degree of skepticism on my part, but you also believe that dead home appliances go to the Happy Toasting Grounds."

"And _you_ believe that women think stories about yer chess club meetings are sexually arousin'. I'll go with Kryten." Lister turned back, looking at the splotch ahead. He could see, now, that the stars were not a homogenous group of white dots; greenish-white dots and bigger red ones were scattered around the outside, while the inside held yellowish and bluish-white stars. "Gorgeous, innit? All of those orbs, hanging in space."

"If you don't want a swift kick to your orbs as they hang in space, miladdio, pay attention to the ranking officer aboard," Rimmer snapped.

The way to Rimmer's annoyance is to ignore him - something that Lister did too little of, he chided himself. "Take a seat, Krytes; we're goin' in." He felt some satisfaction upon hearing Rimmer's irritated snort.

Cat joined them, neatening his sideburns with a small brush, as they headed towards a planet with a breathable atmosphere that Rimmer grudgingly reported upon. It grew swiftly as the cluster grew slowly, resolving into a dark-blue planet with small brown patches - difficult to see under a thick cover of wind-whipped cloud that was smeared over the surface. They dipped below the clouds, Starbug tossing slightly in the wind; Kryten pointed out a valley between two crags, next to what looked like a broad, flat lake, and suggested tactfully that it might shelter them from the wind. Cat's feline reflexes took them down for a very gentle landing, which Rimmer nonetheless groused about.

Even Rimmer, however, was rendered speechless when they tromped out of the 'Bug. The cluster was setting, and the sight threw even Lister's memories of sunsets - which were improved over reality, no doubt - into the back seat. The light from a fistful of suns - each turning from some shade between reddish yellow and pure white to bloody red as it sank below the horizon - glittered off of the lake they could just barely see in the distance, staining the streaking clouds with every color in the red spectrum, while stars glittered in the velvety blue behind them. They watched in silenceuntil the suns were gone.

"What a sight!" Kryten said, quietly. "Sir... if I may... one of my programmers, Dr. Helga Mogadon, wore eyeglasses that looked _just_ like that. Could we name this cluster after her?"

Lister shook himself as a chill night breeze toyed with his braids, and pulled out a torch. "Sure, Krytes. Oi, let's go check out that lake!" he said, thinking of water that did _not_ taste like too-often-recycled piss. Cat followed him with enthusiasm. Kryten followed with moderate interest, and Rimmer followed Kryten, glancing frequently over his shoulder, giving the impression of a man who is wondering if an attack would be more likely to come on the scout party or on the lander left behind.

Lister and Cat reached the lake together. Cat flopped down, holding his snazzy velvet suit off of the ground in a semi-pushup stance, and sniffed at it. "There's water in there, bud, but something else, too," he said, frowning. Lister dipped his hand in it, tentatively. It felt cool and watery, but had an odd slickness that was not quite water.

Kryten came up behind them, holding the psi-scan. "Excuse me for a moment, Mister Lister, Mister Cat." He held the machine over the water. His eyes widened. "Goodness me, this is dangerous, indeed! It is highly caustic to human flesh. Whatever you do, do not touch it!"

Cat froze, his tongue extended to lap at the water. Lister jumped back, scrubbing his hand on his overalls. Damn his curiosity! He could have _waited_ until Kryten scanned the water. Lister looked at his hand, cringing - but it looked and felt just fine. "Er, Krytes, are you sure about that?"

Kryten looked at the psi-scan. "Yes, sir! It's very clear on..." Kryten frowned, looked hard at the scanner, and then turned it upside-down. "Ah, much better. It's mostly water, with some trace volatile compounds. Quite safe to drink. We can distill out the volatile compounds, then filter the water, and replace our stock of urine re-cyc with this."

"Yeeess!" Lister yelped, as Cat grinned and started to lap at the water.

Rimmer sighed and shook his head. "Why do I suspect that Lister is more interested in the trace volatile compounds?"

Well, Lister thought later, you couldn't really blame him. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a good drink - and the telekinetic wine that Legion served did _not_ count, thank you _very_ much! JMC Lager (TM) was better than the wine Kryten had made from urine re-cyc, but not by much. The stuff that contaminated the water in the lake - or, if you chose to see it that way, the stuff that was contaminated by the water in the lake - was amazingly potent, and whatever contamination remained made it go down very smoothly, he and Cat quickly discovered, after Kryten purified the water and put the 'volatile compounds' aside. Rimmer refused Lister's invitation to try a bit of it, with a suspicious look in his eyes, and went back to Starbug, muttering something about hazardous nocturnal planet-life.

"Good - I could use a few centuries away from typewriter-head," Cat said to Rimmer's departing back. The two living entities drank and sang badly and drank some more and sang even more badly under that dazzling starscape, which only got more dazzling the more Lister had to drink. The night breezes were sweet after the stale air of Starbug, and Lister thought about staying there, drinking water in the morning and booze at night, maybe setting up a little farm, breeding some horses he'd find somewhere, with his Cat, and if Rimmer would only act a little more like Kochanski, he'd have his paradise and his hot-dog stand and would raise animals and kids, lots and lots of kids, under that starcape that was only getting more _lovely_, Cat, wasn't it just _lovely_...?

Lister fell into a very, very drunken sleep.

Which was interrupted much sooner than he would have liked by a deafening roar.


	4. Beast, pt 2

It was the kind of roar that even Lister could not sleep through. It was lengthy, it was loud, and it had an odd liquidy overtone, like the sound a roar might make if forcing itself through a mouthful of slobber. Lister and Cat jerked upright from the picnic blankets they had fallen asleep upon, staring at each other as the roar trailed off into a mucosal snort.

"That sounded hungry, bud, and I know _I'm_ tasty," Cat said, getting to his feet and brushing off his suit. He and Lister grabbed their belongings and hurried for Starbug. Kryten was trotting down the gangway, holding a bazookoid awkwardly in his hand, with Rimmer following and tugging at his shoulder plate, hissing something at the mechanoid.

"Krytes!" Lister yelled. "Toss that down!" Lister did not like the way the muzzle of the bazookoid was dancing all over the vicinity, sweeping him and Cat as often as anything else. He raised his hands to catch it. Kryten started to unhook the bazookoid from his shoulder. Rimmer snatched it away.

"What the smeg are you doing?" Rimmer yelled down at Lister. "Get back in here, and let's _go_!" His words were punctuated by a more moderate, albeit closer, liquidy roar.

Lister stood at the base of the gangplank and shook his head. "You want to leave a gorgeous planet with lakes of clean water and booze just because you heard a roar? Can that hard-light drive make a real spine for yeh?" Lister trotted up the gangplank. "Krytes, bring out two more bazookoids, and then get the engines started, would ya?"

Kryten nodded and hurried up the stairs with a "Yes, Mister Lister!"

Rimmer looked at the mechanoid's disappearing back, looked down at Lister, and said, "Yes, well, I'll just help him with the engines..."

Lister had climbed the gangway just to get within grabbing range of Rimmer. He grabbed Rimmer's arm and yanked. "No way, Rimmer. You're coming with us. Kryten can take care of the engines himself." If looks could kill, Rimmer's would have snuffed Lister on the spot - but they can't, and it didn't. Rimmer stumbled down the steps after Lister as the shorter man leaned his weight on the arm in his grasp. "If it does turn out to be dangerous, Rimmer," Lister snapped, "use the bazookoid on it. Don't try to sell us out to save your skinny arse."

The three of them, armed with bazookoids, tromped back towards the lake. Lister seethed at the 'rear-guard' position Rimmer had automatically taken. Why did he let it bother him so much? Rimmer had never been anything other than a rank coward and a selfish, smeggy bastard; Lister had no reason to expect anything else, none at all. Cat's callous and selfish streak certainly did not bother him to the same extent. Ah, but that was an essential part of Cat's catty nature; Rimmer, he knew, had Ace in him. Rimmer himself had seen that - or could have, if he hadn't been too busy making snide homophobic cracks. Lister sighed. It frustrated him to no end, seeing the man so stubbornly _refuse_ to be anything other than a smeghead.

Lister rounded a crag that stood beside the lake, Cat just behind him and Rimmer significantly behind him. Beside the lake hunkered a creature that looked like a good candidate for the source of the noise they had heard. Lister guessed that it would be three meters tall if it stood upright on its broad, flat, toeless feet. Its flesh was an oddly reflective deep blue, featureless aside from what looked almost like ripples. Its face was triangular, with no visible eyes or nose, and a mouth, hanging slightly open, with no more substance than a sock puppet's. As the three crept slightly closer, it turned towards them, staring at them eyelessly and raising itself to what Lister decided was closer to four meters.

"Eh... hello?" Lister called.

"Lister, what the smeg are you doing?" Rimmer hissed, squinting to aim the bazookoid. Not that any aiming would be required to hit something _that_ size.

"We dunno anything about it. Maybe it's just..." Lister trailed off.

"Just a giant monstrous beast?" Cat said, aiming his own bazookoid. "I hate to agree with goalpost head, but I don't think this dude is friendly."

"Give it a mo," Lister said. The creature had not done anything during the quick conversation aside from cock its earless head slightly. As Lister stepped forward and raised his hand, the creature let out a questioning, almost dog-like whine. "Hey, we're cool," Lister told it.

It bent its head, and its mouth twisted. It opened it, and that odd, liquidy roar they had heard earlier came out - despite the fact that Lister could see, from his position, that the... thing had no throat or tongue. Lister jumped back as it lunged forwards. Cat's bazookoid blast flew over his shoulder and hit the creature in its outstretched arm. Its roar turned to an almost questioning whimper as it staggered back, its arm falling to the ground as a splat of viscous liquid.

"All righ'," Lister said, raising his bazookoid, "I guess it's not friendly." Which was a damn shame. "Back to the 'Bug!" Back to Starbug's cramped quarters again, to stale air and deep space. Back _slowly_, with bazookoids upraised. The three sidled towards the crag they had just rounded. But the creature, leaping with mind-boggling speed and agility, splashed into the lake, then around to cut them off. The three spun to face it, Rimmer backing up to once again put Lister between himself and the beast.

"Right - we'll have to take it down." Lister armed his bazookoid, and was pleased to hear the dual _snick_ of two more arming behind him. He took aim at the creature's head.

Two things happened in rapid succession. The first, which was quite visually stunning, was that the creature turned to liquid and flowed very rapidly into the lake, merging with the blue water. Lister had very little time to process that, however, before the second thing happened, which was Rimmer screeching like a goosed banshee. Lister and Cat turned. Rimmer's rear-guard position had put him very close to the splat of liquid that had been the creature's arm, and it had latched onto Rimmer, enveloping him from the back like evil Silly Putty. Rimmer had dropped the bazookoid and was fruitlessly yanking at the blue goop, which had covered his head and most of his torso.

Lister might have felt a certain poetic justice at Rimmer reaping the fruits of his own cowardice, but the fruits were looking worrisomely dangerous. "Rimmer!" he yelled, then paused, trying to think of something useful. Something useful came to him. "Go to soft-light!"

Either Rimmer heard, or the same thought had occurred to him. He wavered and re-formed in a red uniform, and the blue beast fell right through him. Part of it hung up somewhere in Rimmer's chest area, however - and as Rimmer turned to look at Lister, a horrified expression on his face, he disappeared. The patch of liquid oozed to the odd blue water and joined it, Rimmer's light bee just visible inside of it before it sunk into the depths of the lake.

"Rimmer!" Lister yelled, running to the edge and looking into the bluish substance. Rimmer's light bee was nowhere to be seen. Lister turned to see Cat leaning against the crag they had initially circled, checking his nails with his bazookoid propped beside him.

"Well," said Cat, "we're safe, we have water, we've gotten rid of left-part armpit-hair, and we even have a little something to celebrate with!" He slung his bazookoid over his shoulder and started to walk back to Starbug.

Lister hurried after him, thinking furiously. "We have to get Rimmer back. Think!"

"The only thing I'm thinking about, bud," Cat said, airily, "is why the smeg you keep going back to rescue him every time he gets his own ugly behind in trouble. Leave 'im, for once!"

Lister shook his head. Even if it were something Rimmer himself would do to Lister, he wasn't about to leave the hologram behind. It just... wasn't right. Lister might not be the neatest man in the world, he might drink a bit more than most, and, in his moments of extreme honesty, he had to confess to himself that _maybe_ he wasn't really a better guitar player than the love child of Eddie Van Halen and Mark Knopfler - but he _did_ do what was right, as well as he could, and that was just how it was.

Lister slapped the Cat on the shoulder as they came to the base of Starbug's gangway. "Drop off the bazookoid and come with me. I have an idea.


	5. Beast, pt 3

**A/N: Thank ye for the reviews! Yes, Lister i was /i pretty pissed, but as mentioned in Infinity Welcomes... when Lister gets drunk, he gets _drunk_. The DVDs are so worth getting - for both the leisurely, commercial-free viewing, and a very good set of bonuses. And the plan is so cunning, you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.**

**I've tried to make the source of the dialog more apparent in this trio; let me know if I still need to work on that.**

**I took a plot point from Last Human, as I wanted to play with it a bit (so to speak).**

**------**

The ceramic-cased electromagnet was smegging _heavy_; it did not help that the smooth casing made it awkward to hold, as well. Lister and Cat had struggled and sworn at each other on the trip from the docking bay to the gangway; Lister had to enlist Kryten to help get it down to the ground when Cat dropped it and flat-out refused to fetch and carry anymore 'like a smegging dog.' It did not help Lister's temper one bit when Cat flopped on the electromagnet to take a nap as he and Kryten were moving it.

However, Kryten could not be in the vicinity when it was activated, and so Lister prodded the Cat awake once it was on the ground. Together, they pushed it out to the lake, Cat hissing a nonstop stream of complaint about having to work, about sweat stains and dirt stains, about the ignominy of having to leave all of his metal jewelry back at the 'Bug, and, as they neared the crag in front of the lake, he gave up once more, and, straightening, shook his finger in Lister's face with a, "If there were any other cats around here, bud, I'd have to kill you for even _suggestin'_ that I do this!"

Lister was sweaty and tired at that point, and could not help twisting his lip in annoyance. "Don't worry - they'd see what a bloody great help you weren't." He sighed and rested on the magnet, stretching his sore arms. "Maybe we're close enough for it to work, now. Let's give it a shot."

Cat leaned against the crag and started to neaten his hair as he watched Lister. Lister moved around the magnet, checking contacts and wires. He had no idea why the lander had an electromagnet welded into a corner of the docking bay, but he was not about to second-guess its presence; he had unbolted it loose where necessary and cut it loose where necessary (actually, he had probably cut a few bits he was supposed to unbolt). Satisfied that everything was in place, he threw the plastic toggle. The machine hummed, and his belt buckle, which he had forgotten about, snapped off of his belt and landed squarely on the magnetized section of the ceramic chunk. His pants slowly slid to the ground. Cat sniffed. "Are you _trying_ to make me sick, bud?"

Aside from the belt buckle, nothing had been attracted to the magnet. Lister pulled his pants back up and turned off the magnet. "Maybe it needs to be closer to the lake. Let's just shift it a bit, righ'?"

Cat shook his head. "Not just yet, bud. I need to cool off a bit. Look at this!" He pointed at a slightly damp spot under his armpit. "This can't go on!"

Lister shook his head. But he could stand to catch his breath, as well, before browbeating the Cat into helping him again. He shuffled ahead, one hand holding his pants up, and peeked around the crag - where he saw Rimmer, who was sitting by the side of the lake in soft-light red.

"Piece o' smeg magnet," Lister muttered, walking over to Rimmer. The hologram did not acknowledge his presence; as he drew closer, Lister saw that Rimmer had an expression on his face that would have matched being buggered by a tram. "Rimmer?" he asked, cautiously. He extended his free hand, holding it roughly where it would be if the hologram's shoulder were corporeal and Lister's hand were resting on it.

Rimmer turned, his eyes still wide. He stood up, unsteadily, not noting that his body passed through Lister's hand. Lister pulled his hand back; Rimmer normally bitched like a jilted debutante when anyone tried to put anything solid through his projection. But he merely stared at Lister, swaying slightly. He put out a hand as if to steady himself on Lister's chest, but his hand passed through, and he swayed less slightly.

"Er," Lister said, trying to catch Rimmer's eye, "you have a hard-light drive, you know. You OK?"

Rimmer finally seemed to focus on Lister. "Oh... yes... I do, don't I?" He looked down at his hand, frowning at it.

"Yeah." Lister scratched his head, and his pants started to slip down again. He grabbed them quickly. "You want to come back to the 'Bug, man?" Rimmer most definitely did not look like himself, but Lister wanted him out of there before the water beast-thing came back.

Rimmer frowned at his hand more fiercely, and shimmered slightly, shifting to hard-light with a gentle whumpf. Lister grabbed Rimmer's shoulder with his free hand and started to shuffle away from the lake, hauling on an unresisting Rimmer. "Oh, yes - Starbug," Rimmer said, absently.

Cat sighed as the two of them passed. "Damn, you found him, didn't you," he groused, falling in behind the two. "Nice going, curry-stain."

**------**

Lister plopped a still-stunned Rimmer at the midsection table with a hot cup of tea in front of him, then called to the cockpit, "Hey, Krytes, let's get out of here, eh? Forget the magnet. They can have it."

"Er, yes..." Kryten trotted into the midsection, rubbing his square fingers together nervously. "Well, I don't think we can do that, sir."

"Why not?" Lister asked, feeling his voice rise in pitch. "We need to get outta here before the liquid beast decides to come back!"

"I could not agree more, yes, but the fact is... the engines are offline. I can't seem to get them to come up."

Lister sighed. Two chicken soup technicians, a sanitation droid, and a self-obsessed Cat; their chances of repairing the engines were not great. But they had to try. "Right, we'll..."

Rimmer interrupted him by taking a noisy slurp of tea. "Yes, they said they wouldn't let us go just yet." He sounded more like himself - which, unfortunately for the situation, meant he sounded significantly more annoying. Lister turned, but Rimmer just stared moodily into his tea.

"Rimmer," Lister asked, "you _spoke_ with them?" Rimmer nodded and took another noisy slurp of tea. "Well?"

"Well what?" Rimmer snapped. He looked up to see Cat, Lister, and Kryten all staring at him impatiently. He looked back at his tea.

Kryten suddenly snapped his plastic fingers. The sound was eerie. "Of course! The trace elements in the water - given intelligent control, they could allow conductance to be precisely controlled. It - whatever it is - could interface directly with your light bee, couldn't it?" Rimmer nodded, mutely.

"So if it's sooo intelligent," Cat asked, leaning against the wall, "why couldn't it talk to us?"

"It's from another dimension," Rimmer told its tea. "It doesn't understand the idea of sound. It can't... hear. But it... said... that it would keep us from launching until we... made up for... taking part of its body."

Kryten nodded. "Only a little of it would have to spill when we brought it onboard. Even a small amount could creep into the engines and cut them off from the main controls."

"Whot's it want?" Lister asked, nervously. "Not parts of our bodies, does it? I like all of my body!"

"You're the only one," Cat muttered. Lister ignored him.

"Sort of," Rimmer told his tea, firmly. "It picked out the idea of DNA from my bee, and it rather likes the thought. It wants some."

"Oh, well," Kryten said, far too quickly, "this is carbon-based life-form talk, I see. If you need me, I'll be..." He pointed at the cockpit, and trotted swiftly into it.

Lister looked after Kryten with confusion, then turned back to Rimmer. "Whut, it wants a blood sample? We can spare a bit, as long as it isn't... well... _all_ of it."

"No, it doesn't like the iron," Rimmer told his tea.

"Then what..." Lister paused. Cat's silence behind him indicated that the feline had gotten to the end of that thought before he had. "Oh, you mean, it wants..." Lister waved his hand vaguely.

"Yes, it wants..." Rimmer waved his hand vaguely.

"Let me get this straight," Lister said, crossing his arms. "We have to wank into the lake. Then it'll let us go."

Rimmer nodded. "So it said. Not in so many words. At least," Rimmer leaned back, lacing his fingers in his lap, "you've had plenty of practice, miladdio." He raised one eyebrow with a sneer. Lister stopped worrying about whether the hologram were all right, and began to debate whether he should work on making the hologram not all right again.

**------**

Rimmer and Lister sat on the lander's side of the crag. Cat was on the other side, making his contribution to the cause. Lister had no idea why Rimmer was there, but figured it was to enjoy Lister's discomfiture - which Lister had plenty of, thank you very much. Rimmer had been all too correct about the practice Lister had gotten - hell, if wanking were a sport, he was in Olympic trim - but somehow, doing it in his bunk at night or in the rare shower, when they had enough water, was very different from doing it into a sentient lake. He wondered if the creature would try to make a female water-form for him to do it into - then stopped with that line of thought. If he kept along _that_ line of thinking, he wouldn't be able to get an erection for this. Hell, he might never get an erection again.

"Need any help, miladdio?" Rimmer's nasal voice was not what Lister needed. "I can't say I'm willing to lend a hand, but if there's anything else I can do..." Rimmer was enjoying this far too much, Lister decided.

"You can smeg off. Why aren't you cowering at the 'Bug with Kryten?" Lister muttered.

"Oh, I'm always willing to give moral support to my crew_members_, Listy. I know you're going through a hard time, but if you keep a stiff upper lip..." Rimmer trailed off at the sound of footsteps.

Cat rounded the crag, looking thoroughly disgusted. "What a waste of, well, _me_," he sniffed. "Your turn, bud. I'm taking a very long shower." Cat swaggered back to the 'Bug, the dance gone from his step.

Lister stood, wondering if Rimmer was going to needle him all of the way through this. He took the direct route, and put his hand on his trousers. "You here to watch, Rimmer?" he asked, leering.

Rimmer held up one hand and turned his face away. "No, that's _quite_ all right..."

Lister giggled and walked around the crag. He walked up to the blue lake, and stood there for a moment, feeling very self-conscious. The lake was still and serene, but he felt like a million eyes were on him. He closed his eyes and tried to think about the fact that he was the last human alive, and there was nobody else alive for him to feel self-conscious _about_. That did not help at all, and he was discouragingly flaccid. He tried to think about past sexual encounters, which lead him right to the most recent one - the highly drunken one that he could not even remember, only that Rimmer had been somehow involved. A part of his mind pulled out the thought that, if Rimmer had sucked him off, he could just walk into the lake and switch to soft-light in order to make the delivery. Lister pushed that thought out of his mind, and thought, in rapid succession, about Kochanski, Pete Transet's lovely sister, and the weathergirl from Channel 27. That did the job of getting him erect, and he quickly started to rub one off. From among his strange, wandering thoughts, he snatched the one that considered that his semen was, in a way, currency, and he found something very studly about that. It was enough to let him finish off. Unfortunately, the come trickled out in thick glops instead of spurting with any distance behind it, so he had to quickly swipe it up with his hand and fling it into the still blue liquid. He shook as much of it off as he could, then, unable to deal with the thought of rinsing his hand off in the water-beast, he rubbed his hand on the dirt before tucking himself back into his pants and refastening them.

**------**

They launched in a pointed and uncomfortable silence. Kryten tried to make a few cheerful comments, but he was roundly ignored, and fell into a bit of a mechano-sulk. They headed towards the cluster, with the unspoken agreement that they would hunt for a planet _without_ a pan-dimensional liquid beast with a penchant for sperm. The cluster was just as beautiful as before, but Lister could not suppress a twinge of discomfiture at the sight.

He did, however, have one thought up his sleeve to take everyone's thoughts off of what had just happened - and dear lord, did they need to! He stood up, clapped his hands together, and walked into the midsection, rubbing them together. "Come on, guys!" he called. Cat stood and followed, Kryten behind him; Rimmer sighed, loudly, but stalked into the midsection after them.

Lister turned, grinning. "Well, I checked the chronometers, and according to them, it's Christmas. And, by good luck, we just came off of a planet that has some truly _excellent_ booze. So what do yeh say we break out with a few bottles of distilled liquid-beast, and celebrate?"

"Well..." Kryten said, slowly.

All of them turned to face the mechanoid. "What?" asked Cat.

"Well," Kryten repeated, "er... there wasn't quite room for both the urine recyc wine and the liquid-beast alcohol. And, considering the experience you had, I thought that you would rather leave the latter behind..." Kryten trailed off as the three other crewmembers stared at him, mutely. "Oh, dear. That was wrong, wasn't it?"

"Ho ho ho," Rimmer snorted, stalking back into the cockpit.

**------**

_You remember, sir. Christmas day, we were attacked by that pan-dimensional liquid beast from the Mogadon Cluster.  
-Out Of Time_


	6. Holiday epilog

A/N: Later that day...

------

Arnold J. Rimmer, JMC hard-light hologram, reluctant dead companion to the last human alive - if one were feeling generous enough to call Lister that - was not happy.

If anyone had stopped to ask him why he was not happy, he would have told that person, irately and tersely, that he was in no mood to discuss it. As nobody stopped to ask him why - despite the copious body language he was using to express that he _was_, from his flared nostrils to his crossed arms to his restless legs - he was annoyed and irritated that people could be so unsolicitous.

Even when he stalked into the midsection, where Lister sat knitting a shapeless blob while Kryten attempted to clean Lister's boots with Lister still in them, nobody bothered to notice that he was not happy, or to ask him, with all kindness, why he was not, so that he could feel better by rebuffing said person. Rimmer paced irately from one side of the midsection to the other a few times, but Lister's attention was on his knitting, and Kryten's attention was on Lister's left boot. "I'm not pleased!" Rimmer barked, finally.

"Why aincha' pleased?" Lister asked, picking out a knot.

"Do you know what today is?" Rimmer asked, still pacing.

"Yeah. It's Christmas," Lister told the knot.

Kryten either finished what he was doing or gave it up as a bad job. From the state of Lister's boots, Rimmer guessed the latter. "Yes, I have been pulling up Christmas customs from my holiday database. I have hard-boiled some eggs and hidden them throughout the lander. I have also made some unleavened bread. We have no red wine, but I have added food coloring to the urine re-cyc wine..." he hurried into the kitchen as he trailed off.

Rimmer stopped pacing. "Nice going, Kryten. In like Flynnowitz." He tapped his foot. "It has been over a year since we lost Red Dwarf. Is this what we have to look forward to? An eternity of celebratory beverages that are increasingly indistinguishable from the human (and I use that word in the loosest sense) waste from which they are made, used to celebrate Kryten's decayed memory of Chreasterkuh, as we plod through the universe trying to catch an ancient, slow trash can with the use of an even slower and more ancient lander?" Rimmer shut his mouth with a snap.

Lister put down his pile of yarn. "What do you want me to do about it?"

Rimmer sighed and looked heavenward. "I want you three to disappear and be replaced by three blond, female Space Corps test pilots in tight silver flightsuits with their nipples making those little pointy dints in the front."

"Funny," Cat yelled from the cockpit. "I was thinking just the same thing."

Rimmer took a close look at one of the chairs, brushed some of what he was sure was dirt off of the seat, and sat in it, gingerly. "What is _that_?" he asked, looking at Lister's current project doubtfully. It was yellow and red. Beyond that, Rimmer could draw no useful information. It was about two feet wide, and long enough to trickle off of the table and puddle on the floor.

"It's a gift. I'm tryin' to make one for each of ya. You know, the personal touch and all." Lister picked it up and looked at it critically.

"Yes, but what the smeg _is_ it?" Rimmer asked, flaring his copious nostrils at it. It was a look that he found expressed just the perfect balance of haughtiness, condescension, and a manly level of inexperience in the domestic arts.

Lister picked up one end in each hand and pulled his arms apart. The knitted thing dangled between his hands like a suspension bridge with half the wires cut. "Er, not sure, exactly. A cozy cozy, mebbe."

"A cozy cozy?" Rimmer asked, dubiously.

"Yeah. Something to keep your cozies warm." Satisfied, Lister went back to his knitting.

"That is pathetic." Rimmer stood again.

"Yeah? What'd you get me, eh?" Lister asked, torturously making another stitch.

Rimmer spread his hands, indicating the general stuck-on-lander-ness of his situation. "Where in the smeg am I supposed to get anything?" he asked, annoyed. The futility should be obvious even to someone of Lister's limited mental capacity!

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Lister growled. "'Least I'm tryin'."

"Well, _tell_ me, Lister," Rimmer said, leaning over the table, "just what do you _want_? A guitar-shaped waterbed? A cold set of trainers? A crate of curry paste?"

Lister dropped his knitting, looked up at Rimmer, and shrugged. "Peace on Earth, goodwill towards men, all that smeg, I guess."

Rimmer put his right elbow in his left hand and tapped his lips with his right forefinger. "Ah. Well, the human race is now gone from Earth..."

"Prolly pretty peaceful, then," Lister muttered, sadness crossing his face.

Rimmer barged ahead. "And you are the only man left, I believe."

The sadness in Lister's face lessened, replaced by snark. "Yep! So if yeh can show me a little goodwill, I'll have everything I want!"

Rimmer sat back down, flexing his fingers. "Just _how_ do I do that?"

"Tell me you like the prezzie I made for ya." Lister fished under his chair and pulled out a blue-and-green knitted pile, tossing it across to Rimmer. He then settled back to his red-and-yellow monstrosity.

Rimmer picked it up. It was long, it was generally rectangular, and Doctor Who would not be displeased to show up in public with it around his neck. No way in smegging hell would A.J.R. be seen in it, extinction of the human race be damned. Still, if he wadded it up and stuffed it under the foam wedge that the designers of Starbug laughingly designated as a pillow, it might help with the hard-light crick in his hard-light neck. "It's a... lovely... thing," Rimmer pronounced, dropping it on the table and flicking it away slightly with two fingers.

"There, now," Lister said to his yarn, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, "was that so difficult?"

And although Rimmer protested, quite loudly, that it was, indeed, nearly physically painful, some small part of himself had to admit that it wasn't.

_Very_ quietly.


End file.
